GILROY
– Gilroy High School officials are in 11th-hour discussions to
bring back the controversial practice of adding value to grade
point averages of students who take the most rigorous classes.
The practice, known as grade weighting, is the latest sign GHS
leadership has shifted its philosophy toward encouraging more
students to take more challenging courses.
GILROY – Gilroy High School officials are in 11th-hour discussions to bring back the controversial practice of adding value to grade point averages of students who take the most rigorous classes.
The practice, known as grade weighting, is the latest sign GHS leadership has shifted its philosophy toward encouraging more students to take more challenging courses. The potential shift in grading policy comes on the heels of a decision to add more honors courses to the GHS curriculum, something that parents and students had fought to reinstate last school year.
Principal Bob Bravo has called an open forum to discuss weighting and other grading policies. High school administrators want to get school board approval on the policies by next month. The forum will be held Monday, May 5, in the school library. It begins at 7 p.m.
“It gets my vote,” says Linda Sheffield, a 25-year veteran academic counselor who owns and operates College Bound, a Monterey-based academic advising firm. “It only is good for students in the long run. This is a numbers game, and not giving a student the opportunity to improve those numbers is only going to work against them,” Sheffield said.
Under current GHS grading policy, a student who gets an A in regular biology receives the same amount of grade points as a student in advanced placement biology. AP courses are college-level classes. They are considered more rigorous than regular classes and if students pass a year-end standardized exam, some universities give them college course credit in that subject.
Former Gilroy High principal Wendy Gudalewicz ended the school’s policy of giving an extra grade point to AP students’ semester grades last school year. Gudalewicz, now an educational consultant, stopped weighting grades because she believedit became more of a detriment to students than it was a benefit.
“We ended it mostly because students were choosing to take AP classes solely for the weighted GPA. Some were not following through with course work and were just depending on the extra weight as a cushion,” Gudalewicz said Tuesday. “We also had students asking us not to put leadership or choir (elective courses that aren’t weighted) on their transcripts because they were afraid it would lower their grade point average. Colleges want to see leadership and choir classes on a transcript, but we couldn’t convince (students) of that.”
When Gudalewicz stopped grade weighting at GHS she did it without school board approval. Bravo is foregoing his administrative authority in this instance to get the stamp of approval from school board trustees.
“This is part of an overall grading policy,” Bravo said. “We want board approval.”
At issue for opponents of grade weighting is whether the practice really plays a large factor in college acceptance.
GHS counselor Erin Gemar leans toward a non-weighted policy, but says both sides have valid points and pros and cons that must be addressed.
“I signed several applications for students just today and all of the forms had a place where it was asked if the GPA was weighted or non-weighted,” Gemar said.
Opponents of weighting also claim that because high schools around the state and country have different grading policies, universities must recalculate GPAs in order to make sense of them.
“GPA is almost irrelevant now. It’s about the grade you got and the level of the class you took,” Gemar said.
Sheffield doesn’t entirely agree.
“UC Berkeley probably had about 35,000 undergraduate applications this year. It becomes a numbers game. They take your GPA from 10th- and 11th-grade and they multiply it by 1,000 points and put that on your academic profile,” Sheffield said.
Admissions committees then factor in the rigor of classes and extracurricular participation in something called a comprehensive profile, Sheffield said.
At least some GHS seniors wish they had weighted grades when applying to universities this year.
Senior Danell Dow said some colleges she applied to asked for weighted GPAs. Since they weren’t on her transcript she added it up herself. Doing the math was a cinch, but the future veterinary medicine student would have felt better had the GPA been a part of her official record.
“If we had weighted grades it would have made it a lot less of a hassle,” Dow, 18, said.
Dow said a B she received in one of her AP classes also affected her class ranking – a factor in the processes of college admissions, scholarship awards and valedictorian selection.
“It was really disappointing,” Dow said.
Other issues to be discussed at Monday’s forum include:
• Whether students who miss class more than half of the days per quarter should receive an F.
• Whether students receiving incomplete grades due to an excused absence should be given four weeks to make up the grade before it becomes an F.
• Whether students may drop a course in the first three weeks of school without penalty.
• Whether grades should be assigned for citizenship and whether those grades should factor in eligibility to play sports or do other extracurricular activities.
If you are unable to atttend but want to give feedback on any of the above points please send a note or email to ro**********@gu**.us.
